The House Government Operations Committee wants to strengthen Parliamentary oversight as it takes a hard look at the estimates review.
The House Government Operations and Estimates committee, which was created 40 years ago specifically to help review the spending bills, started a study of the estimates process Feb. 15.
“I think that the degree to which we do that is pretty shoddy and hasty. I think there’s a lot of changes that could be made so that Members of Parliament undertake that responsibility more seriously,” said Liberal MP John McCallum (Markham-Unionville, Ont.) who is vice-chair of the committee.
The estimates outline every cent a government is asking for permission to spend in that fiscal year.
They come out in phases, three or four times a year, in thick powder-blue books containing billions in funding. So far in 2011-2012 Parliament has authorized $259.4-billion in spending, and the government has the option of tabling one further round of estimates before the end of the fiscal year March 31.
Parliamentarians have long complained that the estimates documents aren’t detailed enough and in any case, no one is reading them that closely.
Conservative MP Daryl Kramp (Prince Edward-Hastings, Ont.), vice-chair of the House Public Accounts Committee, told The Hill Times last fall, during the last round of supplementary estimates, that the lack of scrutiny is “one of the greatest weaknesses in Parliament.”
Parliamentary expert Ned Franks said that the “main source of Parliamentary power” is its mandate to scrutinize spending, but there are some obstacles between MPs and the exercise of that power.
A ruling by then-House Speaker James Jerome in 1979 had a chilling effect on committees that wanted to conduct a detailed study of the estimates, said Mr. Franks. A report from a committee with recommendations on a program in the estimates was rejected when it was tabled in the House.
“Here they were smacked down when they tried to write a report about what they thought about what was in the estimates that they had been given. That really meant that the committees lost interest,” Mr. Franks said, adding he thinks the practice should be repealed to allow committees to make more meaty reports.
When reviewing the government’s spending estimates, committees can vote to reduce funding, or not to approve it, but can’t increase funding or change its purpose.
House procedure currently dictates that a committee would be “going beyond the scope of its order of reference,” by issuing recommendations on programs through the estimates process. A committee does have the ability to study a program on its own time.
If a committee doesn’t report back on the estimates, after a deadline the spending estimates are automatically deemed to be reported, a practice, and that MPs have said need to change.
“If the estimates are not examined, they are somehow deemed examined, and that means that they could just go totally by the wayside,” said Mr. McCallum.
Conservative MP Mike Wallace (Burlington, Ont.), also pointed the practice out as ripe for review.
NDP Treasury Board critic Alexandre Boulerice (Rosemont-La Petite Patrie, Que.) said that it’s currently “almost impossible for us to do this work correctly.”
Mr. Boulerice said that the timing of the estimates processes, with funding votes happening all year long, makes it impossible to compare estimates documents to other years. Added to that is the estimates’ complicated relationship to the budget.
“The budget deals not with supply, which is what the estimates are, but with ways and means, which is taxes and raising the money, not spending it. Having said that, the Minister of Finance, of course, in the budget speech, covers both expenditures and revenue raising,” said Mr. Franks.
Treasury Board starts the annual process of preparing the main estimates for the year, tabled at the end of March, in the fall of the proceeding year. While the estimates and the budget usually come out within weeks of each other, the preparation and printing schedule means budget initiatives don’t make it into the spending votes. Those would appear in supplementary estimates later in the year.
Mr. Wallace, who is also vice-chair of House Government Operations, said this is something that he’d like to see addressed, as did Mr. Boulerice and Mr. McCallum.
House committee representatives from all parties agree the estimates process needs to be changed, something that Mr. McCallum said makes him hopeful, but he pointed out that the final say rests with the government.
“I don’t know yet whether they are willing to take this seriously or not,” he said.
Mr. Wallace said that his thoughts on potential reform, including giving MPs training and examining the structure of the estimates, were his own, and had “nothing to do with the government position.”
The House of Commons Procedure and Practice, known informally by the surnames of its authors, House Clerk Audrey O’Brien and Deputy House Clerk Marc Bosc, points out that the estimates scrutiny process has to balance the right of the government to pass financial bills, and the opposition’s right to critically examine them.
“If Parliament did not approve an appropriation or an estimate, that would likely be construed as a vote of confidence,” explained Mr. Franks.
Mr. Franks said the gravity of voting against an appropriations bill (as the eventual vote on the estimates is called) raises the stakes.
“It also makes it less likely that if a committee found an obvious flaw in a program in the estimates, that a committee would strike that down,” he said.
Mr. McCallum added that another potential change would be to institute a minimum number of hours that the estimates would have to be studied before a committee could report on them.
Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page has also weighed in on what needs to be changed.
Mr. Page said the estimates are a “façade that’s been created to suggest that we’re actually doing this power of the purse role.”
“I think the structure is just completely wrong,” he said.
“We ask Parliamentarians to vote on these inputs, and I can just imagine if you’re Member of Parliament who’s been thrown on a committee like Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, and they say that we’re going to vote on an $8-billion grant contribution vote. The first reaction is, ‘What’s in that bill? What are the activities and are they working? Is this value for money?’ But instead we ask them to them to vote on an $8-billion [grants and contributions] vote, or a multi-billion dollar operation votes in other departments. That structure has to change away from voting on inputs—operations, capital, cutting across complete departments—to actually voting on activities,” he said.
Mr. Page said he expects to be called to the committee as a witness for the study.
Last week, the committee heard from Treasury Board Secretariat officials. It was an in-camera session, a measure that Mr. McCallum said was “rather silly.” He would like future meetings on the subject to be held in public. From the department’s Expenditure Management Sector, including Bill Matthews, assistant secretary; Sally Thornton, executive director; and senior director Kenneth Wheat; and Marcia Santiago, senior director, Expenditure Management Sector, Expenditure Operations and Estimates Division.
Mr. McCallum said the rationale for going in-camera was to shield novice MPs from embarrassment for asking questions about the estimates.
Mr. Wallace said the meeting was a briefing, and it’s traditional to hold those in-camera.
“It allows more freewheeling questions, maybe, from the members of Parliament, and allows the bureaucratic level to give you maybe a more freewheeling answer,” he said.
Mr. Wallace also said that he believes the committee will also hear from the Auditor General’s Office for the study, and that he thinks the committee should look to other countries to see how other budget processes work.
“Hopefully from there some best practices come and some recommendations are actually implementable by this government,” Mr. Wallace said.
Mr. Franks noted that in England the process for reviewing the estimates is non-partisan and more thorough, in part because ‘Select Committees’ are mandated to deal with government spending, while legislation goes elsewhere.
Mr. Franks added that the current lack of scrutiny in Canada is “depressing.”
“Those who were involved in establishing the committee system, and I had a very minor hand in that, were hoping that the committees would become more active and influential and much less partisan and be able to do a better review of government activities and expenditures,” he said.
“Let’s say the expectations of the people who made the reforms weren’t high, and they haven’t been met.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: Jessica Bruno
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